Splunk
The Splunk log management and IT intelligence platform lets you search in real time on any user, network, system, or application activity, all from one place. Splunk provides ongoing compliance monitoring for log review, audit trail collection, reporting, and file integrity monitoring. You can even stretch into IT business intelligence; correlation and reporting templates let you see transactions as they happen.

What Matters In Low-Cost Tools

MUST HAVE

Serivce desk integration

CMDB support

Poilicy-based management

Basic monitoring

Alerts

Low price

NICE TO HAVE

24/7 Support

ExtensibleUser support groups

Customized reporting

Workflow automation

Free

Price: $5,000 for enterprise version with support and 500 MB of daily indexingwww.splunk.com.

Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold Distributed Edition enterprise management suite from Ipswitch includes a dashboard that provides a visual representation of all your networks, making it easy to see what's going on, where, and when. IT managers can log in anywhere and anytime, managing access to network data.

With network mapping and active polling, you can get a full view of your network and systems environment at an incredible bargain.